


Where All Paths Lead

by thedevilchicken



Category: Original Work
Genre: Getting Together, M/M, Masturbation, Saving the World, Superheroes, Supervillains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:14:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24887413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Max - aka the supervillain Terminus - has the power to see possibilities. He sees all the ways to get what he wants.Then he's told about a mythical crystal and all the possibilities begin converging. He sees the end of the world.Now he, and the only superpowered people that he hasn't forced out of the game, are the only ones who can stop it.
Relationships: Male Superhero/Male Supervillain, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 3
Kudos: 59
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	Where All Paths Lead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oneiriad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneiriad/gifts).



When the proximity alarm sounds, he glances forward through the possibilities and his powers can't tell him who it is that's arriving; all branches cease abruptly before he can see his visitor's face. If he went upstairs to the control room and took a quick look at the system, he could find out, but he knows there's really no point to that: the fact that he can't see past setting foot on the staircase means it's one of two people. One of two aliens, he guesses, though no one really makes that human/alien distinction anymore, not unless they're making some kind of ham-fisted point about it. They look human, even when they're hurtling across the Caribbean at a hundred miles per hour. They sound human when you talk to them. They're actually more pleasant people than most of the humans Max has ever met. 

It could only be two people, but he tries not to get his hopes up; it's more likely to be Brightstar than Darkstar, mostly because Eddie still lives in his dreadful condo in Florida that smells rather strongly of dog (because, surprisingly, he has a dog - a golden retriever named Woof who looks about as old as his rather aged owner and is firmly in love with the air conditioning), whereas Tom rarely comes down from the ship. Tom spent a long time alone before they did what they did that ultimately saved the world from post-apocalyptic winter, so he can't blame him for feeling like he doesn't fit in the way that Eddie does. One of them spent the past half century getting old on a beach in the shade of the sports pages and the other one lived so far north of the US-Canada border that maybe it didn't even count as Canada anymore, freezing his arse off to keep the world safe from himself. Tom got to stay young and Eddie didn't - even now, Eddie still looks seventy if he's a day while Tom looks maybe thirty at a push - but that doesn't seem like a particularly fair trade. Not that Max would relish the idea of life with lawn ornaments and bowling on a Tuesday night. It clearly suits Eddie, but to him it sounds a lot like hell. 

It could only be two people, so he doesn't bother arming the island's elaborate defence systems. He can't see past the next moment where either of them is concerned so there really wouldn't be a point to that, even if he ever meant them any harm - the fact is they could wipe him out in an instant if they wanted to and the defences wouldn't mean a goddamn thing, but even if they both know that would probably be the best for continued life on Earth, they're also both too nice to actually go through with it. No one else has the capability to do it but them and they don't have the stomach, like there's a code they follow, like they're living in a cheerful golden age comic book and not the real world. Of course. Max's real world is a private island off the coast of French Guiana, and the idea that he's a legitimate businessman of any kind at all is frankly quite laughable. He's only a businessman in the sense that he does business, but his business is in information of the kind no one else but him could get. He sells it not to the highest bidder but to the one who'll use it in the most amusing way. Basically: he's a supervillain. He has been for quite some time.

He's _the_ supervillain, as it happens. When you can see all the possibilities that lie ahead, nobody can stop you. When you can see that one chance in a million that gets you to the thing you want, when you can write it down and sell it and if the buyer does exactly what you say then they can't lose, you're a supervillain. He knows what he is. So do Eddie and Tom, but they're not going to do a single thing about it. So does Rav, but he's her former best customer and present landlord, so it's not like she's going to turn her nose up at his money, especially when he asks for all the intriguing stuff, not just death rays and bionic legs for a Bond villain white cat or whatever the other villains on her client list want. He's never asked and she's never told him, but that's not exactly a surprise; they're on relatively friendly terms, even more so now than they were before, but he's not sure that he'd call her a friend. Of course, _relatively friendly_ just means he hasn't ruined her the way he has most of the world's other superpowereds, and he lets her live in his garage. 

Frankly, Max knows he's never been a good guy. He's never really tried to be because he's never really felt a need to be. His parents were by all accounts normal to the point of being well and truly boring: his father worked with Japanese-French translation of dull product descriptions and his mother was an English teacher - they'd met when he'd come to France to study. Their Parisian suburb was both leafy and green with no particular points of interest to mark it out as different. They'd called him Maxence after his grandfather on his mother's side, and that was who he lived with once they'd died in the accident that made him who he is. He doesn't really remember much except they called it radiation poisoning, though they couldn't say what sort of radiation. It killed them. It did something else to him, just like similar events across the world have done to others. He's kept an eye on that. 

Max was nine years old when he robbed his first bank. He was fourteen years old when he made his first million selling plans and secret data. At nineteen, the path he wanted to take led straight through a superhero, but he didn't let that stop him. And by twenty-seven, he owned a nice little island. He didn't need to leave it very often, which suited him quite nicely; people just presented far too many choices anyway, and he could do all his business from his living room. He had supplies flown in from the mainland, employed a staff of ten to fifteen people who he paid extremely well and instructed to stay out of his way, and he liked life there a lot more than he'd liked life anywhere else on Earth. His grandfather has always preferred Paris, but they still Skype twice a week.

He was twenty-nine years old the first time he saw the world end. It was the day he first heard about the crystal; it was big as a car, they said, shining and blue. It had come out of the sky like a thunderbolt and crashed down into a diamond mine, or a gold mine, or a sapphire mine, or maybe it was just copper or coal, collapsing the whole thing behind it, except the man who told him the story didn't know where it was. He'd heard about it from a friend of a friend in a bar in Marseille, so they'd both probably been rather drunk at the time - sometimes over the years he's thought it's a shame he can only see the future, not the past, but he thought he'd settle in and ask himself the question anyway. What could it hurt? It was a little open-ended for a quick scan but at the very worst, he'd get a headache that would go away again in an hour or two and the certainty that it was all pie in the sky; at best, he'd get an extraterrestrial crystal roughly the size of his Range Rover. 

He wasn't sure what he'd do with it, but the fact it had apparently come from space was intriguing. Since Brightstar and Darkstar had first popped up in the late 1940s, since the first wave of superpowereds, the first superheroes, no one had been able to explain how that had happened. Max had had ambitions to find out since the day his parents had died, he had to admit. He'd spent so many years walking into secret facilities to retrieve files, or else having other people do it for him just because he could, and perhaps this was a link he hadn't found yet.

In his hotel room that night, before he flew back to the quiet of the island, he lay down on the bed and he asked himself: how do I get it? But instead of branching paths, the logic tree that would take him from his bed to the crystal, all he saw was one outcome. What he saw was snow. He saw ice. He saw the end of the entire fucking world. And, in the middle of it, there was a man whose face he couldn't see, the lone survivor of the damn apocalypse. 

The day he heard about the crystal was the day he saw the world end, and the day he saw the world end was the first time he saw Tom. He saw him standing there, after the death of the world, every time he tried to see himself getting his hands on the crystal. He'd never experienced anything like it, quite honestly; there were things that were impossible for him to do, yes, few and far between as they were, but he always saw the possibilities, all the branching paths that led through each decision that would take him a step closer until he either did or didn't meet his goal, but this? This was a complete and utter failure of his powers in a way he'd never experienced before. And as much as he told himself what it must mean - that him starting down that path would lead inevitably to what he saw - he was intrigued. It was horrifying, yes, and made his heart pound and his stomach sink, but that didn't mean it wasn't also exhilarating. It had been so long since he'd been surprised. He'd been so bored for so very, very long.

Sometimes, in bed at night, he'd close his eyes and ask that question just to feel that total lack of any certainty. Sometimes, in bed at night, he'd close his eyes and ask the question just to see the man who would survive the end of the world. It was hard to tell very much about him, given the snow-swept landscape and the fact that he was so far from any kind of landmark, or any object that might lend him some sense of perspective; he might have been tall or short, and he was wrapped in a thick coat, the fabric worn and slightly tatty at the edges, a long scarf wrapped around his neck and pulled over his head like a hood. Most of the time that was all he could see - a very cold man in a wasteland of snow. Sometimes he saw blue eyes, very light, almost icy themselves, which made his own brown eyes feel very brown indeed. Sometimes he wondered who he was, and what he looked like. Mostly, he just asked himself what kind of power he had that took him to the far side of Armageddon still alive.

He wondered if looking for the crystal would take him to that man. He wondered if that man was the one who'd ended everything, or if maybe he - Maxence Ikeda, Supervillain Extraordinaire - done it himself. In the end, he decided it really didn't matter: he told himself he just wouldn't look for the fucking thing. He wouldn't think about it, he wouldn't ask himself those questions, he'd beat his curiosity down for the sake of his own life if nobody else's. But by thirty-six, almost every choice he made seemed to lead straight to it; he'd see the end of the job and then that, the icy wasteland, no life but that man, nothing, with no idea why and no idea how. And so, one day, he started asking himself another question, of a sort that didn't come naturally: how do I prevent it?

Nothing worked. The paths didn't branch when his stated goal was _prevent the end of the world_ any more than they had when the goal had been _find the crystal_ , and _find the man_ resulted in precisely the same thing as the rest. He couldn't even see what happened. With those questions in mind, he couldn't see beyond opening his eyes and standing up. Something was standing in the way. 

So, he made a decision: if he couldn't stop it, he'd just have to live through it. That was when he called Ravinder. 

"Well, of course I can make it," she said. "If you have fifty million dollars and a place in it for me when the world goes boom." At least, he thought, she knew him well enough not to question his sincerity.

He had fifty million dollars. And when he looked down that path, he saw the wasteland but he also saw them living. He saw fifty years of playing games of chess where he knew all the moves she'd make before she made them and all the times she'd fix something electrical by putting her hand on it and murmuring under her breath like she was the fucking toaster whisperer or something equally absurd. In almost every path, she outlived him and spent fifteen years there alone in a bunker on his island, talking to the appliances because there was no one else alive. She seemed surprisingly happy about it though given the fact that he spoke more to his plants than to anyone else on the planet, even more than his grandfather, perhaps that shouldn't have surprised him. Sometimes their powers could be a little...isolating. 

"Let me call you back," he said, and then he asked himself another question: if she could build something to keep it out, could she build something to keep it in? Yes, he could see that, but he couldn't see _how_. Could they stop it? No. Could anyone? Yes, but he couldn't see _who_. Then he called Rav back, told her to get on a plane, and in thirty-six hours, she arrived. It was a start, at least. And perhaps he wasn't the most well-equipped for teamwork, but he knew he would have to do something. Day by day, all possible branches were shortening. Soon, there'd be no way to avoid it at all.

They'd never actually met before, at least not in person. They'd spoken on the phone - Max always knew the times that he could call and she'd answer, and even if he knew broadly what she'd say, and what the outcome would be, he usually found he didn't mind having the conversation. Having his gift has meant so much boredom over the years, knowing precisely how each encounter could and couldn't end before it even starts; the fact is he can walk into a room and know how every conversation will unfold, which men he could persuade to go home with him, what they would and wouldn't be willing to do, what that would look like, how that would feel. Rav, though, has that extra edge that superpowereds always have; perhaps she can't surprise him, not really, but there are times when she manages to slip in a word or two that he doesn't see coming. He thinks sometimes that's why he did what he did to the rest of them: because they posed just a bit of a challenge, and just to prove he could. He didn't need the money, after all, not that he turned it away. He ruined their reputations and let the bad guys win, but they all know it's him. They've just never been able to stop him. It's been a long time now since anyone's tried.

She arrived, on a helicopter over from the mainland that landed on the helipad sitting on top of the house, and he met her there. He wasn't surprised by her age; her ID said she was twenty-one but he doubted that, and her files said she'd been orphaned just like he was at the age of six. She did most of her work out of an industrial estate outside Manchester, England, creating gadgets for whoever happened to call her, whether hero or villain. She maybe wasn't the most popular supplier because what she built never quite did the job to the fullest extent, but he knew she did that on purpose: she wasn't trying to _help_ either side, not really, and the few times he'd asked himself _would she build me a death ray?_ had brought back the answer _it would be more like a "light dizziness, sit down and have a cup of tea" ray_. He liked that about her. It made him smile when not very much did anymore. 

"So, what is this about, Max?" she asked, once they were sitting in his living room. She was wearing the overalls she'd left her workshop in, because apparently _I want you to help me keep the world from ending_ had got her full attention in a way that usually only a new and exciting gadget did. It made him feel very overdressed in his nice black suit, though he'd known it would, but he also knew it would have the right kind of gravitas for the situation even if he also knew he'd be changing into a pair of shorts in less than forty minutes. Of course, denim shorts and a t-shirt with _Megadeth_ emblazoned on on the front didn't really give anyone the correct impression, unless that impression was _I grew my hair this long for the purposes of a circle pit_. 

"It's exactly what I said on the phone," he said. "I want you to help me save the world. It's going to end, Rav. I've seen it. Multiple times."

"And I'm supposed to trust you? How do I know you're telling the truth?"

"Perhaps because you know that having guests here isn't my idea of fun," he said. "Perhaps because there are a hundred other things I'd rather do with my time than persuade you the sky is falling. I'm bored but Jesus Christ, I'm not _that_ bored." 

She frowned. Then she shrugged, apparently just as convinced as she'd been on the phone. "I mean, that seems fair enough," she said. "It's not like I had much on anyway. You put all the best superheroes out of business." 

"All the best superheroes were out of business before you were in it," he pointed out. "There hasn't been a good one since you were ten years old. I haven't exactly depleted your client base." 

"Yeah, well. You haven't been good for it, either." She pulled her legs up onto the couch and he tried not to wince at her feet on the cushions; apparently he hadn't seen that coming. "So, what do you want me to do? I thought you wanted a bunker."

He explained. She nodded. And, once the jetlag had worn off, they got to work. 

The containment vessel took a week to design and four months to build, down in the hangar where he kept a small plane and a Land Rover. He still doesn't have a licence for either thing; he's never officially learned to fly or drive, either, though that doesn't usually stop him learning skills. What it takes is a couple of hours to follow that path inside his head, to really pay attention, and he has a new skill at his fingertips. Sometimes, when he's especially bored, he'll set aside a day or two to learn a language, or to play the violin, or skydive. Sometimes, he asks how he could jump from a plane and survive the fall. Sometimes, he asks what would happen if he didn't; he's found his power isn't actually limited by the prospect of his own death, so he supposed he shouldn't have been surprised by seeing past the heat death of the planet. 

"Look, this would be a lot easier if I knew what we were trying to contain," she said, more than once, while she was making it. He had to be there every step of the way, to see if the choices she made brought up images of a snowy wasteland or humanity's continued survival as a species, which unfortunately entailed a great deal of conversation. Conversation and biscuits imported from Britain, as it happened; she apparently worked best with a cup of tea at one elbow and a plate of custard creams at the other, though that particular day, when they were just adding the finishing touches, when she was sitting on top of the three-by-three metre box, was rather absent its usual biscuits. She seemed grumpier for it. 

"I still don't know," he told her. 

"A thing? A person?"

"Maybe." 

"Maybe which?"

"Maybe either. I don't know why you don't understand _I don't know_." 

She sighed. "You're rubbish," she said. "Psychic supervillain my arse, you're completely rubbish. You've got to have some idea." 

"I don't know. Maybe it's a mythical crystal that fell out of the sky. Maybe it's the only person left alive after everything else gets frozen. I don't know. I'm not actually psychic." 

"Except you kind of are." 

He groaned. He rubbed his eyes. He didn't feel much like explaining the ins and outs of the pseudo-subtle distinction.

"Wait, you said a crystal?"

"Yes." He looked at her, slightly blurry from the rubbing, as she sat there dangling her legs from the top of the box. In that particular way, she didn't look half as chipper and annoying. "Why?"

"Well, I've got this client. He pays me to let him know if anything like that comes up for sale. E.T. crap. Bits of asteroids from outer space."

"Dare I ask who it is?"

"Let me give him a call." 

She pulled her mobile out and when he asked himself who she was calling, he couldn't see it. There was a fuzzy space there, not quite right, paths that drifted into static, which was new in itself. His pulse quickened.

The person she called, as it turned out, was Eddie Bright. She put him on speaker and he swore a blue streak when Max told him what he'd seen. He said he knew exactly what it was. He said he knew exactly what to do, because they'd kinda done it before, back in the sixties, before Max or Rav had been born. And it sounded like nonsense when he said it, except nothing he said seemed false at all and anyway, it was Eddie Bright; they were talking to Brightstar, alien, former superhero, the world's first, who'd lost his powers and drifted off into relative obscurity. Relative obscurity was, in this case, apparently a Miami suburb with a nice swimming pool and a rather stunning ocean view. 

"We're going to need a team," Eddie said. "Who've you got?"

"Well, there's me," Rav said. "And there's Terminus."

"Terminus?" he replied. "The dick who made everyone retire?"

"To be fair, Go now has a very successful YouTube channel and Ether went to law school," Max said. 

"Fire and Ice went to rehab." 

"And who exactly do you think paid for that?"

The argument didn't exactly go well. They petered off into silence, possibly because they both knew the world was coming to an end and Max had pissed off all fifty-four of the other superpowereds currently living in the world so strongly that they'd never believe a word that passed his lips. Then Max said, "It's Darkstar, isn't it. The man I see after the world ends." 

Eddie sighed loudly enough to make the speaker crackle. Then he said, "Well, yeah. He's been out there since 1962."

In the end, it was easier to get Eddie on a plane than it was to continue speaking on the phone, given Eddie's tendency to ramble and Max's complete lack of ability to cope with that without ending the call abruptly. Rav played with the box while they waited and Max laid on the hangar floor next to it and asked himself what he could find out about Darkstar; as long as he stuck to archives and newsreels and didn't ask _where is he?_ the path didn't end in a blizzard. By the time Eddie arrived in the helicopter, grumbling about how once upon a time he'd been able to fly and had to be flown, Max knew what little there was to know about the world's missing alien hero. Eddie sat himself down in the living room and he filled in the rest over a beer, or two, or five. And then, that night, Max lay down in bed and asked the question. He saw him again. Four days later, he saw him in person. 

They took the box with them when they flew north. They dropped it in the middle of a snowy field and the radio crackled and Eddie told the guy on the other end of it, "Get in the box, Tom. We're getting you out of here." Max was there the whole time, alert, engaged, in case anything they did was going to bring on the apocalypse, but nothing happened that triggered his sense for disaster. When they picked up the box, there was a man inside it; it was the same man Max had been seeing in his head for years, with those ice-blue eyes. 

Back on the island, they put the box back into the hangar. And they talked, while Darkstar - Tom Starr - started cutting off his beard. Between the four of them, they made the plan that would save the world. 

In 1931, two alien children fell to Earth and were taken in by two neighbouring American families: the Brights and the Starrs. In 1961, the ship they'd travelled in finally arrived after them and their escape pod, devoid of life and its engines turned low, on a collision course. Brightstar and Darkstar understood not very much about what had made them who they were, but knew that the ship couldn't be allowed to crash; when they went up into space, they'd quickly understood the power of the engine core and how broken its containment was. After a year of study, all they could think to do was pull the core free of the ship and then hide it; they hurled it to Earth and buried it inside a diamond mine, where they hoped nobody would ever find it, and it might be in some way contained. Of course, people saw. And, of course, they'd both expected to die that day. What happened was they found out where their powers came from: exposure to the engine core. In space, new exposure increased Darkstar's powers exponentially, to the point where he could no longer control them. But, under pressure on the Earth, in Earth's air, what it did to Brightstar was take his powers back instead. 

The plan formed: Eddie and Rav would go up to the ship and with her help they'd fix the core containment. At the right time, Tom would push down into the mine and put the core into the box, and if he had the power left, he'd take it up. 

It worked. They saved the world, and they set the engine core back into its original containment, now perfectly repaired for the job. But it didn't work quickly: Eddie and Rav were away for two months. Max stayed on the island with Tom, who couldn't leave the box; he'd been living on his own for sixty years for a reason, after all, in case his superpowers blasted a fifty-mile crater and took all life in the vicinity with it. And he has to admit, it was an experience he hadn't expected at all. 

For seven years, he'd been seeing the man in that box, more frequently and more frequently, until almost every basic line of thought he had ended in the snow that whipped around his face. Now there he was, in the flesh, on the other side of the not-quite glass, where he could see him, and talk to him, not wonder if he'd ended the world or just been left alone on Earth by it. He couldn't see their conversations at all, not a single word of them. Everything he said was unexpected. Every look was. Every smile. Max wondered if this was how other people felt, or if this was something different.

Through the external airlock, Max passed him a rolled-up futon mattress and a blanket. The next day, he asked him for a comb and a toothbrush and a cloth and a bowl of water; that was easy enough, he thought. The next day, he didn't have to ask for the bowl of water; Max just brought it to him. And the day after, Max brought him a set of new clothes. He turned his back while he put them on, though disconcertingly he'd have liked to have watched.

And then, the next day, when he went into the hangar, he caught him with the shirt he'd bought for him pushed up under his arms and his trousers down around his knees. He caught him with his erection gripped tight in his hand. 

"I'm sorry," Max said. "I didn't realise. I didn't think." And as Tom looked at him, cock still in hand, Max disappeared; he didn't listen to the words Tom tried to call after him, and sent one of his employees down to see if he needed anything brought to him instead. But that night, in bed, he couldn't not think about him. For the first time in years, he couldn't see whether he'd even be interested, let alone if there'd be anything he could say to persuade him. For the first time in years, what he had in his head was a fantasy, not a possibility, not that he thought it was a great idea even then. They couldn't be in the same room together, and chances were at least one of them was going to die in the commissioning of their world-saving plan.

"I should apologise," Tom said, two days later, when Max finally went back into the hangar, not that he was there for him, or at least he told himself he wasn't - the issue was he couldn't see where he'd left Rav's biscuits and the fact he couldn't meant they had to be down there. "It's been a long time since I haven't had to worry about losing control, and I just...you know. Let my guard down. I guess I should've heard you."

"It's fine." 

"I'm still sorry." 

"It's really fine."

"I guess we all do it." 

"I suppose we do." 

"Do you?"

"I..." Max frowned. "That's quite a personal question."

"I mean, no offence?" 

"I'm not offended. I'm surprised." Max frowned. He laughed. "I'm usually quite difficult to surprise."

That night, he left his bed and went down to the hangar; there was a light on in the box, and Tom was lying there on the futon, stripped down to his vest with a borrowed book in his hand. He put it down when he saw him, but he didn't say a word; he just pushed the blanket aside and turned onto his back, lifted his hips and pushed his trousers down. He didn't need to take them off completely, but he did, till he was lying there naked from the waist down. He pushed his vest up out of the way. He went up onto his knees by the box's transparent wall. And as Max stood and watched, he stroked himself until he came against the transparent wall. The next night, he joined in, awkwardly, his pulse unexpectedly quick. The night after, when he pressed his forehead to the box, so did Tom. The night after, when Tom got so close to the wall that his knees pressed against it, so did Max. The tips of their cocks brushed against it. They were inches apart. It was the most thrilling thing he'd done in years. 

Two months together on the island, separated by the box, talking in the daytime and...something else at night. Two days to take him to the place where Eddie had collapsed the mine and set him down. Two hours later, they expected Tom and Eddie would both be dead; what happened was they both touched down. On Earth, in Earth's air, the ship's crystal core sapped enough of Tom's power to make him safe again and not thoroughly volatile. In space, it gave Eddie back everything that it had taken from him. And, at the end of the week, Tom went back to the ship; he said he was just used to being alone, but Max really isn't so sure.

Max silences the proximity alarm and he goes back to his book on the couch by the window. Sometimes he wonders why he bought an island instead of just a house in the hills or something more practical, but he still likes the isolation of it. He doesn't find himself wondering what would happen if he spilled his coffee on that woman's lap or nudged that man into the ankle-deep puddle and how the rest of their day might branch out from there. He can swim instead, quietly, or read a book or watch a film, and let his mind wander. These days, though, when it wanders to the crystal, he doesn't see snow; he sees the world going on without him in it, and he understands it's just not something he was meant to have. He supposes that the one good thing about it is he didn't destroy the world after all, and now he can't. 

Rav moved in after. She likes the climate on the island better than England and she's turned half the hangar into a workshop and the other half into a flat, and Max doesn't quite pretend he doesn't know she supplies half the world's new budding heroes with their equipment. The quality's got a little better recently, but he doesn't say much about it. After all, he's getting toaster maintenance free of charge. 

Sometimes, Eddie visits. He says he does it to make sure he's still on the straight and narrow, but they both know he's not; he's still selling information for his own private entertainment. He just also sends a few anonymous tips about fires and floods and crashes, too. It keeps Eddie happy, superpowered nonagenarian that he is. At least he can fly again, and doesn't have to complain about the helicopter.

When the door opens, though, it's not Eddie - it's Tom. His hair's ruffled from the flight, but Max guesses his would be if he'd just come down to Earth from orbit. He's wearing his supersuit, too, which is just as well because chances are jeans and a shirt would've burned up on reentry. Maybe Max wouldn't've minded that, but it might have scandalised his staff.

"I wasn't expecting you," Max says, carefully. 

Tom smiles wryly. "Yeah, I guess you weren't," he says. "I could've called. I forget I could call." 

"You don't have to call." 

"I should've." 

He runs his hands over his hair. He doesn't really look different now, not except for the suit, but there's something different about this. 

"It's quiet down here," Tom says. 

"Sometimes." 

"Do you like it?"

"Yes." 

"Do you want to be alone?"

Max frowns. Before this, he'd have said yes; what he wanted most in life was peace and quiet. Now, though, he's not so sure. Now he has Rav watching terrible British soap operas on the television while he tries to read a book. Now he has Eddie not quite managing to beat him at chess, and Tom is standing there in front of him. The simple truth is he doesn't want him to go. 

"Not as much as I did," he says. 

Tom smiles. And when Max stands, Tom steps in to kiss him. 

Apparently, that's good enough for him.


End file.
